Illinois High-Energy Group Builds Calorimeter Modules for LHC

Led by Professor of Physics Steve Errede, a group of Illinois researchers, including faculty, technicians, and graduate and undergraduate students, has designed and fabricated elements of the ATLAS detector for the Large Hadron Collider, the next-generation European particle accelerator now under construction at CERN.

The ATLAS collaboration is the largest ever attempted in the physical sciences; 2000 physicists from more than 150 universities and research institutes representing 34 countries are building this detector.

The Illinois group has constructed ~200 submodules for the U.S. Extended Barrel Scintillating Tile Hadron Calorimeter for ATLAS, where they were recently assembled in a building at CERN to verify that they all fit together properly. There are 8 submodules in each module, and 64 modules are needed to complete the entire calorimeter, in 360 degrees in f. Now that the whole calorimeter has been completely assembled, it will be taken apart and temporarily stored until it is installed deep underground in the ATLAS collision hall at the LHC. To get an idea of the size of the detector, note the people standing on the catwalks at the top of the photograph. (A higher-resolution image is available here.) The Illinois group also tested about one-third of ATLAS's 10,000 photomultiplier tubes (PMTs). A artist's rendering of a cutaway view of the U.S. Extended Barrel Scintillating Tile Hadron Calorimeter is shown below.

The U.S. Extended Barrel Scintillating Tile Hadron Calorimeter represents just one-fourth of the total Scintillating Tile Hadron Calorimeter. The main Barrel Scintillating Tile Hadron Calorimeter (built by ATLAS collaborators in Italy, Czechloslovakia, and Russia) and a second Extended Barrel Scintillating Tile Hadron Calorimeter (built by ATLAS collaborators in Spain) will also undergo module pre-assemby. The U.S. Extended Barrel Scintillating Tile Hadron Calorimeter is the first to be assembled.

The LHC will probe deeper into matter than ever before. Due to switch on in 2007, it will ultimately collide beams of protons at an energy of 14 TeV . Beams of lead nuclei will be also accelerated, smashing together with a collision energy of 1150 TeV. Watch a great movie about ATLAS here.

The Illinois work was supported in part by the U.S. Department of Energy (Grant DE FG02 91ER40677). Any opinion, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed herein are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Department of Energy.

© Copyright 2003 by the Department of Physics at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

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